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Freud's Metapsychology and the Culture of Philosophy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Extract
I don't believe in any interpretation of dreams. I don't want to believe in dream interpretation. I will not touch this last freedom.
— Elias Canetti, The Secret Heart of the Clock
To begin, what I hope will be a surprise: in what follows, I will not be talking (much) about sex and its societal vicissitudes. A surprise because the linkage of Freud's name with the theme ‘civilization and oppression’ will immediately suggest to many a discussion of Freud's theories in Civilization and Its Discontents. It is there that Freud famously argues that civilization, necessary for security in the fulfilment of basic sexual instincts, is made possible only by the restriction of expression of those very same instincts. Worse, the erotic impulse that drives individuals together into community can achieve this limited (“aim-inhibited” — i.e., anti-incestuous, monandrous, monogamous, heterosexual, family-oriented) satisfaction only if the other set of basic human instincts — toward aggression — is also severely inhibited. Civilization's frustration of sexuality is experienced in individuals as neurosis, and its repression of instinctual aggression is achieved by turning the instinct inward, back on its source, in the form of guilt, anxiety, an excoriating conscience, a punishing super-ego.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 25: Civilization and Oppression , 1999 , pp. 211 - 226
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Authors 1999
References
1 Vol. 12, Penguin Freud Library (hereafter PFL), trans. Strachey, JamesGoogle Scholar, vols. 1-11 ed. Angela Richards, vols. 12-15 ed. Albert Dickson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973—); Vol. 21, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (hereafter SE), ed. and trans. Strachey, James (London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1960)Google Scholar. For details of the argument covered in the following précis, see especially sections 3-4.
2 Readers with an interest in the influence of Freud's views on social, political, historical, and cultural theory will find a rich and varied literature. The following are intended as points of entry only: Abramson, J.B.Liberation and Its Limits: The Moral and Political Thought of Freud (New York: Free Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Alford, C. F.The Self in Social Theory: A Psychoanalytic Account of Its Construction in Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Rawls and Rousseau (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brown, Norman O.Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1959)Google Scholar; Craib, I.Psychoanalysis and Social Theory: The Limits of Socialogy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Glass, J.M. ‘Hobbes and Narcissism: Pathology in the State of Nature,’ Political Theory 8 (1980): 335-63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Habermas, JürgenKnowledge and Human Interests, trans. Shapiro, J.J. (London: Heinemann, 1972)Google Scholar; Keat, RussellThe Politics of Social Theory, chap. 4 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981)Google Scholar; Lasswell, HaroldPsychopathology and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1930 & New York: Viking Press, 1960)Google Scholar; Marcuse, HerbertEros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955)Google Scholar; Rieff, PhilipFreud: The Mind of the Moralist (New York: Viking Press, 1959)Google Scholar and Freud: Political and Social Thought (New York: Random House, 1970); Roy, JeanHobbes and Freud, trans. Osler, Thomas G. (Toronto: Canadian Philosophical Monographs, 1984)Google Scholar. For a discussion of the rôle of politics in the construction of Freud's own views see Brunner, JoséFreud and the Politics of Psychoanalysis, Part D (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995)Google Scholar. For a detailed phenomenological discussion of Freud's work as, in part, a “theory of culture,” see Ricoeur's, Paul exceptional study, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Savage, Denis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970)Google Scholar.
3 PFL 11, 190; SE 14, 186.
4 SE, vol.l.
5 The Interpretation of Dreams (hereafter ID), chap. 7, section E passim.
6 Though it was rejected by Freud as an unsatisfactory attempt to solve the problem of consciousness, its prescience may be measured by the enthusiasm that has greeted accounts like George Edelman's. Although Edelman does not claim to be a neo-Freudian, there are numerous and significant points of comparison. See especially Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (New York: Basic Books, 1987) and The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness (New York: Basic Books, 1989). See also Pribram, K.H. and Gill's, M.M.Freud's ‘Project’ Re-Assessed (New York: Basic Books, 1976)Google Scholar.
7 Freud's continued use of the word ‘cathexis’ is one of the strongest indicators of the degree to which his later thought remained indebted to the model sketched in the “The Project.” The word signifies, here, the psychic energy with which an idea, image, or object is invested; and Freud's understanding of this phenomenon remained metaphorically, if not literally, quantitative.
Examples may help clarify his notions of displacement and condensation. According to the theory, we would speak of ‘displacement’ in the following sort of case: a person, unable to acknowledge childhood abuse at the hands of a parent, displaces the feelings attendant on the abuse onto a chronic disease from which the parent suffered, and hence regards the disease with a degree of terror, anger, and grief that most of us would find puzzling. We would speak of ‘condensation,’ on the other hand, when a person anxious about job security, on the outs with a co-worker, and under siege from a bureaucracy, dreams that a key piece of equipment keeps malfunctioning. However, it should be noted that the two do not always function independently. For example, feelings about a sequence of events — an unexpected visit by a family member, a quarrel, a disturbing insight about that person's past relations with someone else — may be focused in or on a single apparently minor occurrence, tea staining a napkin, say. Condensation? Displacement? Arguably both.
Freud himself provides elaborations and examples in ID, chap. 6, sections A and 8, and chap. 7, section E; PFL 4, 753-56; SE 5, 595-97.
8 PFL 11, 190; SE 14, 186.
9 ID: PFL 4, 763; SE 5, 603.
10 ‘The Unconscious': PFL 11, 191; SE 14, 187.
11 From a letter to Georg Groddeck dated June 5, 1917 (trans. Tania and James Stem); quoted in PFL 11, 191, n. 4.
12 ID: PFL 4, 755; SE 5, 596.
13 This summary characterization must be gleaned from a number of sources, which in turn must be bolstered by discussions in the “Project” if they are to be fully intelligible. See in particular ‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’ (PFL 11, 29-44 and SE 12, 218-26); ID chap. 7, sections E and F (especially PFL 4, 758-71 and SE 5, 598-611); ‘The Unconscious,’ PFL 11, 207 and SE 14, 201-2; The Ego and the Id section 2 (PFL 11, 357-66 and SE 19, 19-27); and ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology,’ SE 1, especially 322-35 and 360--87.
14 ID: PFL 4, 169; SE 4, 96.
15 ID: PFL 4, 669; SE 5, 523.
16 Cf. Wittgenstein, LudwigPhilosophical Investigations, trans. Anscombe, G.E.M. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell & Mott, 1958 [1967)), section 201Google Scholar.
17 ID: PFL 4, 756; SE 5, 597.
18 See especially section 1, ‘Justification for the Concept of the Unconscious.'
19 That they are distinct need not entail that there is no overlap, nor that there are not ways of thinking that involve both. I am indebted to Ernest Hartmann for emphasizing to me the degree to which it may be appropriate to conceive of their relation as that of poles on a continuum.
20 For insightful observations on this and other features of jokes relevant to the present discussion, see Cohen's, Ted paper, ‘Jokes,’ in Pleasure, Preference and Value, ed. Schaper, Eva (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 120-36Google Scholar.
21 For an example of such a dream, see, e.g., ID: PFL 4, 652-53; SE 5, 509-10.
22 Rycroft, Charles ‘Freud and the Imagination,’ The New York Review of Books 22:5 (3 April 1975): 26–30.Google Scholar
23 Freud himself did not write much about music, priding himself on having a tin ear. Are music and its appreciation products of primary or secondary process thought, on his scheme? A difficult question, whose answer may well be “both.” To the extent that primary process is involved, however, it would have to be primary process of which we are to some degree aware.
24 Keats, John Letter to George and Keats, Thomas Sunday (21 December 1817?), address and postmark not recorded, in The Letters of John Keats, ed. Foreman, Maurice Buxton (London: Oxford University Press, 1952)Google Scholar.
25 Wittgenstein, LudwigPhilosophical Investigations, sections 455-57Google Scholar; John Keats, Letter to George and Thomas Keats, in The Letters of John Keats.
26 Manser, A.R. ‘Dreams,’ in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edwards, Paul (New York: Macmillan, 1967), vol. 2, 415.Google Scholar
27 Cf. Sontag, Susan ‘Against Interpretation,’ in Against Interpretation (New York: H. Wolff and Toronto: Ambassador Books, 1969).Google Scholar
28 I have elsewhere defended at length the view that meaning is a phenomenon broader than, and an ontological category deeper than, language. It may even be broader and deeper than the notion of logos I am developing here, but it is at least that large. See Lyric Philosophy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992).
29 Zwicky, Lyric Philosophy, section 18Google Scholar.
30 Portions of this essay have been delivered as parts of talks variously titled “'Dream-Logic’ and the Politics of Intelligibility” and “Freud and the Roots of Philosophy” at the Universities of Guelph, Simon Fraser, Toronto, and Victoria, and at a Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science entitled “Dreams as Reason; the Reason of Dreams.” My thanks to members of those audiences for helpful comments and questions. Special thanks to James Young for commenting on an early draft of one of the talks, and to Catherine Wilson, whose editorial acumen resulted in the present essay.